How Not Sleeping Actually Kills You

It’s mostly not about your brain:

To die, to sleep; no more

First, let’s quickly cover how important sleep is:

• Fun fact: you can stay awake for the rest of your life
• Less fun fact: it will be a short life, if you do that

On which note:

• Bad news: a single sleepless night can impair thinking, attention, and reaction time enough to resemble being intoxicated.
• Worse news: consistently getting too little sleep is associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, obesity, depression, Alzheimer’s disease, and other neurodegenerative conditions.
• Worst news: not sleeping at all will eventually kill you; unclear how long it takes since no ethics board will let scientists do experiments on humans for this one, and when people out in the general world are forced to remain awake until they die, that invariably means there are confounding factors (including whatever hardships are keeping them awake)

This latter one also held up science in the area of non-human animal studies, since for a good while scientists failed to account for the deleterious effects of stress on lab animals that were being sleep-deprived. In essence, they were torturing animals to death and forgot to account for the torture, which (ethical issues aside) is quite a methodological flaw.

This mistake continued until a 1989 rat study exposed both sleep-deprived rats and control rats to the same stressful conditions, but only the sleep-deprived rats received almost no sleep. Many of them died despite showing no obvious brain damage.

Importantly, because researchers found little evidence of major brain injury in the rats, they began looking elsewhere for the fatal effects of sleep deprivation.

The gut appeared to be the key organ: in later studies with Drosophila melanogaster, researchers found a dramatic buildup of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the gut in cases of sleep deprivation, but not in the brains or muscles. ROS are produced naturally during normal metabolism, but in excess, they damage DNA, proteins, lipids, and other essential cell components.

Antioxidants helped prevent this in fruit flies, but:

• You are probably not a fruit fly
• You would probably like to live for more than 40 days (lifespan of a fruit fly)

So, it’s good to enjoy a diet rich in antioxidants, but please do not think that antioxidants can replace sleep!

For more on all of this, enjoy:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

Want to learn more?

You might also like:

How Sleep-Deprived Are You, Really?

Take care!